Kung Fu Hustle Tagged Articles at Cinematical

On Friday, Spoiler TV posted casting call information for the role of Kato in The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen's long-struggling feature based on the iconic radio and television hero. Prior to the call, Kung Fu Hustle star, writer and director Stephen Chow was attached to play the role, and it would have been one immaculately suited for the longtime fan of Bruce Lee, who originated the role on TV. But now it appears that Chow has another feature he would like to do, and the ongoing scheduling problems the film has suffered appear to have resulted in him bowing out of the project. Thankfully, the filmmakers are maintaining only the highest and most specific standards in their search for a replacement:

"[KATO] ALL ASIAN ETHNICITIES, Male, 20's - early 40's. Brit Reid's manservant/chauffeur by day and Green Hornet's martial arts-skilled sidekick by night. Actor doesn't have to have Martial Arts experience."

According to the IMDB, Chow has moved on to CJ7 2, the sequel to his answer to E.T., which was released in 2007 (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a film for which I contributed the quote "a sweet, funny family fantasy film"). Meanwhile, Rogen is without his ass-kicking sidekick, begging the question: who do you think they should cast as Kato? Suffice it to say there are countless working Asian and Asian-American actors who could handle the role's physical demands, but given what one presumes will be a slightly more comedic bent to the characters' mythology, who would you suggest strap on Kato's black mask and share the screen with Rogen's hirsute Hornet?

Already a popular success in Asia, Stephen Chow's CJ7 arrives in the US, hailed as a Chinese version of ET. (It opens today in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before expanding to other cities in the coming weeks.) Like its predecessor, CJ7 features a young boy who befriends a small alien creature, from whom the boy learns important life lessons. Instead of ET's Elliott, living in the lonely suburbs and pining for his father's return to patch up his divorced family, CJ7 features Dicky Chow (Xu Jiao), living in abject poverty and wishing that his widowed father had enough money to buy him a toy. But don't worry about the differences in the set-up: CJ7 is a gentle and sentimental fantasy, just like ET, filled to the brim with humor. It also casts a sharp eye on the true nature of modern children.

Poor Dicky Chow! The young lad doesn't mind so much going to school with dirt on his face. He doesn't mind so much that his mother is dead and his father can barely provide for the two of them. But what he does mind is when the other kids make fun of his dad. And, what finally sets him off is when he realizes that he can't have the same toy as the other boys in school.

Stephen Chow's still got it. Now in his mid 40's, the Chinese comic actor par excellence has slowed down his output since his prolific earlier days (i.e. the early 90s), when it wasn't unusual for him to appear in three, four or more flicks per year. Firmly in control of his own projects as star, writer, and director, his last two films (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle) have been comedy gold and incredibly successful at the worldwide box office.

His latest, CJ7, a family-oriented fantasy comedy about a kid and a cute alien critter, opened a few days ago in Asia and is making ordinary moviegoers act like postal carriers. (You know, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night ...") Variety reports that thousands of people in mainland China "defied blizzards" just to see the film, pushing the box office take to 60 million yuan ($8.35 million) in just four days of release. It's been equally successful in Hong Kong, grossing HK$15.8 million ($2.03 million) on a massive 100 screens, according to Variety. A different source, Box Office Mojo, puts the gross at $2.11 million, which translates into $24,894 per screen at 85 locations. And in Taiwan, Variety says partial figures peg the total so far at NT$35 million ($1.09 million).

As Monika reported, Chow talked up the film at a recent press conference. The reviews so far has been mixed to good, but not ecstatic (see Variety, Twitch, LoveHKFilm). CJ7 opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 7, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics; hopefully the rest of us won't have to wait much longer to see it. To get an early taste, check out the trailer.

It's been five long years since Albert and Allen Hughes gave us Hell -- From Hell that is -- and though they have been busy with television projects, it is time they got back to the big screen. Well, their next project has now been confirmed as the long-awaited adaptation of the TV-series Kung Fu. For those unfamiliar with the show (I admit, I've never seen one episode), it featured David Carradine as a Shaolin monk who is forced to flee China and ends up in the American wild west.

A script was written for the movie version by Howard Friedlander and Ed Spielman, both of whom worked on the show, but it will be rewritten by Cory Goodman, who also wrote the upcoming Andrew Douglas film Priest. There is no word on casting yet, though Carradine will have to be involved somehow, but Warner Bros. is planning for a 2008 release to coincide, and hopefully garner a promotional tie-in with, the Beijing Olympics.

Considering The Hughes Brothers had been trying to get this job for past two years, they hopefully know what to do with it. Though we don't know who the other filmmakers were who wanted the gigs, I have to wonder if Quentin Tarantino was interested, at least as a writer or producer. After all, he has paid homage to the series through dialogue (Pulp Fiction) and casting (Kill Bill's title character is played by Carradine).

The tie-in part of the story makes me wonder if Hollywood will be putting together any other martial arts films around the same time. We still haven't heard the full stories on the Bruce Lee biopic Martha wrote about last summer, or the mysterious Rob Cohen-directed, Bruce Lee-starring film that Erik mentioned last month. And maybe Kung Fu Hustle 2 is on hold for this very same reason. Okay, I doubt it. The Olympics and cinema may already be linked enough by the promotional videos being shot by Oliver Stone, Giuseppe Tornatore and Majid Majidi.

Any fans of the show care to chime in with your opinion?

The rumors that Stephen Chow would be putting off his planned sequel to international hit Kung Fu Hustle were finally confirmed yesterday, when it was announced that Chow's next project will be the sci-fi flick the internet has been muttering about for weeks. The film, which is currently called A Hope, will star Chow as a wayward astronaut who "accidentally lands on another planet." But it doesn't stop there -- get this: "Through the help of a robot who communicates with aliens, the astronaut develops a father-son relationship with a young alien." Whoa. The role of the alien has yet to be cast (and there's no truth to the rumor that Chow is looking for green-skinned youngsters whose eyes grow on stalks), but Zhang Yuqi will play an android, and Chow regulars Yuen Qiu, Danny Kwok-kwan Chan and Tin Kai-man are also confirmed.

So is Chow moving into tear-jerkingly sincere family films? My experience with him is limited to fantastic, utter insanity (of which God of Cookery is the best example); has he done anything like this -- or at least like this sounds -- before? It'll be interesting to see how this one shakes out, when we finally get to see it next year. Kung Fu Hustle 2, meanwhile, will be pushed back from its 2006 release date, reportedly to allow Chow time to work on the script.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.